hermes-agent

Hermes is Nous Research's open-source autonomous agent. It builds skills from experience, remembers them across sessions, and connects to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and email out of the box. Works with 200+ models through OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Hugging Face endpoints.

Install is one curl command on Linux, macOS, WSL2, or Termux. After `hermes setup`, point it at any provider; switching models is a single CLI flag with no code changes. Runs on a $5 VPS or a GPU cluster.

Pick this if you want one agent deployed across messaging apps without rebuilding for each. The closed learning loop (skills accumulated from prior runs) is a real differentiator vs framework-first kits like LangChain or AutoGen. Solo and small teams pay only their model bill. Large teams running their own RL stack already have this layer.

The catch: it's research-y. Nous is an AI research lab, not a SaaS company. Docs are dense, support is community-driven, and "self-improving" claims always come with caveats. Treat it as an experiment, not a production-grade agent.